Lead

The First Matter

Saturn's metal: the base is not the worthless but what has furthest to go — or heaviness that never lifts.

Lead takes the sign of Saturn unchanged, and it is where the Great Work begins. Alchemy held lead to be the basest of the seven metals — heavy, dull, easily melted, the furthest from gold — and therefore the proper starting material: the nigredo, the blackening, is lead's stage. Saturn was the outermost and slowest of the classical planets, the sign of time, limit and old age, and the metal was read through him. The transmutation of lead into gold is the whole of alchemy stated in four words, which is why this is the metal everyone remembers.